America has a new face, a face that is on display on all television screens and newspaper front pages of the world. When I first saw the new face of America on Italian television in early May, I did not like it, and I did not like what I heard the Italians saying about us. At the site of a Roman village in Sicily, I saw a vendor trying to explain to an American lady: "Bush. Iraq. Boom boom-bombardamenti. Boom Boom. Abu Ghraib. Nicht gut. Bush Scheiss."
America has had many faces over the centuries, not all of them lovable. The faces of Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, sunburnt and wind-weathered, lined with the wrinkles that come from pushing a plough, always looking over the shoulder for an Indian attack, ready to kill to avoid being killed; the face of Sergeant York, the marksman pacifist who killed almost unnumbered Germans in a war he was tricked into regarding as a noble cause; the face of John Wayne who spent his life pretending to be the hero he never was, taking credit for what brave men like Jimmy Stewart and Ted Williams really did. (John Ford should have made Stewart and Wayne switch roles in The Man who Shot Liberty Valance. When Wayne received the Medal of Freedom, I knew the Republicans were as delusional as the Democrats who interview actresses about social problems.)
In the 1960's, we were treated to increasingly ugly faces: the leering dull-eyed philandering Jack Kennedy, the grasping hypocrite Hubert Humprhey, the sneering face of the lying prig Robert S. McNamara (the first draft for Secretary Rumsfeld), the revolting anti-American ugliness of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, and-towering over all of them-Lieutenant Calley, whose moronic grin made a mockery of the phrase "officer and a gentleman" decades before it was befouled by the guttersnipe "actor" Richard Gere.
The public face of America has changed throughout my lifetime, like the Picture of Dorian Grey-with this difference: Dorian Grey had the sense and shame to keep the picture in the attic. We put our Rumsfelds and Kristols and Podhoretzes and Wolfowitzes, our Howard Sterns and Sean Hannitys up on the TV screen to show the world what we have become. God help us, because no one else can.
But the new face of America is not the glowering ugly mug of Richard Perle or the Botoxed smirk of the Democratic Party's latest Ken doll, John Kerry. (It walks, it talks (sort of), it's even more nearly lifelike than Al Gore.) It is not even that portrait of low cunning and sinister greed, the Vice President of the United States. The new America looks like Lynndie England and Charles Graner, a couple hatched in the trailer-court section of Hell.
By now, we all have a glimmering of what they and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Americans were doing in Iraq, and I would rather not go into many of the details. Our leaders and their mouthpieces on talk radio would like us to believe that Graner and England represent only a few bad apples. A few bad apples. How many Charles Mansons is too many? Or Ed Geins?
The same leaders and media pundits say, "Look at what they did to Nick Berg. That is much worse." Really? Even if we accept the official version, which I do not, then a group of terrorists murdered a representative of the occupying power whom they hate (as occupying powers are often hated) by particularly grisly means. I don't follow the logic. Can they seriously be equating the crimes of a few terrorists with the deliberate actions taken by military personnel in a prison? The only way this logic works is if we assume that the Armed Forces of the United States are bound by no higher law and no stricter code of discipline than an irregular bunch of Muslim thugs.
Good Republicans are saying that we are spending too much time on this scandal because it is endangering the security of our troops. Is it the leftist press, drooling and leering with delight, that is endangering our troops or the policies adopted by Rumsfeld and his deputies, who have repeatedly expressed contempt for the norms and conventions of warfare. Whatever the question, Rumsfeld knows and we do not. He knew, according to stories now being reported in the New Yorker, that the best way to get information in Iraq was to round up as many people as possible and "Gitmoize" the process by turning the detainees over to military intelligence rather than to military police.
The really disgusting part about the revelations-coming in not just from Abu Ghraib but from other prisons, from Italian carabinieri in Nasariya, from retiring soldiers and Marines, and from the Reuters employees who were forced to stick their fingers up their rectum and then lick them-is not the killing and torture per se, but the systematic attempt, ordained at the highest levels, to strip the prisoners of their most basic human dignity. Muslims, so the administration was told, are squeamish about sexual matters, so when they are stripped naked, forced to watch their captors having sex, threatened with homosexual rape, and-men and women alike-attacked by savage dogs, they will tell us what we want to know (that is assuming they know anything). The perfect touch is the photographs-potential blackmail evidence that could be given to wives, family members, and neighbors to show that the detainee was sexually humiliated. The genuius who came up with this plan was as brilliant as the genius who used heavy metal and the screams of slaughtered rabbits against David Koresh to drive him over the edge. What will they come up with next? Operations to reverse the digestive tract?
No, this is not the first time that the officers and men of a civilized country have tortured or murdered enemy civilians. American troops committed atrocities in the Philippines during the Spanish American War and against the Germans and Japanese in World War II and again against the Vietnamese, but, in each of these cases, Americans were under severe provocation. Set aside the rightness or wrongness of any of those wars: American soldiers had to endure hard fighting and take massive losses from enemies that did not (in the case of the Japanese, Filipinos, and North Vietnamese) play by the rules. They snapped, and, in the Philippines, they even carried out official policies of murder that were later investigated and condemned by the American government and by public opinion.
What is going on in Iraq is something entirely different. The casualties, although tragic for the killed and wounded soldiers and their families, have not been high, and our technological superiority has rendered any massive resistance virtually futile. The people being tortured and humiliated in Abu Ghraib were not, by and large, violent terrorists caught in the act of shooting Americans or setting off bombs. They were petty thieves-taxi drivers and farmers-who stole to stay alive. But no one, not even a convicted terrorist, deserves the treatment these people have received from their American jailors, and England and Graner-among many others-should be given the death penalty.
Torture and brutal indifference to the lives of prisoners may not be a new story in history, but the organized sexcapades of England, Graner, & Co. belong to the fantasy world of pornographic Nazi love-camp movies. They are lifted from Kraft-Ebbing and Sade, and not from the routine history of man's inhumanity to man. I cannot imagine what kind of people we are breeding in this country and what kind of screening we have in the Armed Forces, if even two such people could end up as guards in a military prison. Under orders or not, no decent human being would perform public sex acts in the hope of humiliating simple people who preserve a shred of modesty and decency, and no one with a spark of humanity would set an attack dog against a naked woman. And if someone, in a moment of moral delirium, was sick enough to do any of these things, he would have to have reached a stage of terminal bestiality to gloat over the photographs of the victims.
When we decided to invade Iraq-instead of any of the countries known to be fomenting terrorism against the United States (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan)-the President told us solemnly it was "about our values." What he seems to have meant is that Muslims have preserved a sense of sexual modesty that we are in the process of destroying and that we are determined to use their modesty and shame as a weapon against them. Almost a year ago, a young officer came up to be at a lecture and told me that he was just back from Iraq. What pained him the most, he said, was that, as a conservative Christian, he had to admit that the Iraqis were by and large morally superior to the Americans he had observed in an out of the Army.
Graner and England are not unique. They had many friends and collaborators, and if one can judge from reality TV shows and the ever-lowered bar of public decency, such creatures may soon represent something like a norm. Of course, there is always the moral-crusading right to protect us from Hollywood. But, listening to the callers who praise Limbaugh and Hannity for defending the criminals and palliating their crimes as a necessary part of the War on Terrorism tells us all we need to know about the audience of "conservative" talk shows.
The real test of character is for our leaders, and they have flunked. The defensive and resentful responses made by the President and his Secretary of Defense reveal that they are morally numb. Rumsfeld now says that publishing more photographs would only make things worse-yes, for him. This scandal-and the administration's lack of a moral response-are a blot on this administration far darker than Nixon's petty burglary or Clinton's romps in the hay.
If Americans choose not to condemn the crimes committed in their name in a military operation financed by their taxes and supported by the votes of their congressmen, then they condemn themselves. And if they don't think the entire world is looking down its collective nose at the moral sewer in which we live, then it is only because, like most Americans, they cannot read the foreign press.
Post-Christian America is being judged and condemned, but where do the Christians stand? All too many of them are hiding their eyes. I am tempted to compare them with Germans who claimed, after the war, "We did not know," but in the German case, the government made effective efforts to cover up what was going on. The equally sick behavior of some of our soldiers-and soldierettes-is known to all, but still the Christians say nothing. No protests, no press conferences, no manifestos. When the Vatican did speak out, the Pope was roundly criticized, and not just by self-styled Protestants.
St. James (1:21-24) told his followers to "lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness," and to be "doers of the word, and not hearers only," comparing those who heard without doing to "a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was." Americans, when they look in the mirror that his being held up, will see the face of Lynndie England, and if they are Christians, they had better not forget what they see.